Art on theMART, aiming to enliven the Chicago Riverwalk with nightly video art shows projected onto the 2.5-acre front facade of the Merchandise Mart, announced its inaugural slate of artists Thursday.

For the project’s Sept. 29 official debut, the crafters of the inaugural video images will be Diana Thater, Zheng Chongbin, Jason Salavon and Jan Tichy, officials with the project announced.

Thater, from Los Angeles, is a widely recognized video artist whose work often includes scenes of endangered animals. Her work is in many major museum collections, and a Thater retrospective was at MCA Chicago in 2015, organizers said.

"For the Art on theMART opening program I’ve made a short art-adventure film that mixes together live footage of wild animals living in the Chyulu hills near Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya,” said Thater, in a news release from Art on theMART. “The work is not narrative and linear — it is simultaneous — with multiple images inhabiting the screen at once, all moving in different directions at the same time. The accompanying soundtrack was all recorded live in Kenya, to further the exotic but peaceful story of elephants, zebras and giraffe in their native habitat.”

Chinese native Chongbin “centers his artistic practice (on) the pre-modern Daoist concept that the natural, inorganic world of energy and matter is living and always changing,” said the release. The selected piece, called “Chimeric Landscape,” “reflects this view as an expanding blot, transforming 2.5 acres of theMART simultaneously into an aperture and a void. There is a rhythm to the movement of the work, and a mysterious yet logical mode in its transformation.”

Also highly decorated and widely collected, Tichy and Salavon teach at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago, respectively.

The pieces done by the four artists will be interspersed with imagery from Obscura Digital, the San Francisco firm steering the technical side of the video projection effort. Located in a new structure on the Riverwalk across from the Merchandise Mart (officially renamed theMART by its owners in recent years), the 34-projector array will deliver nearly 1 million lumens onto the historic building’s south, or river-facing, facade.

The projections will be displayed up to two hours nightly from Wednesday to Sunday and every month except January and February.

With a 30-year agreement, theMART and the city of Chicago are managing the project together. Curation is done by a team of local artists, curators and cultural officials working with Art on theMART executive director and Chicago art historian Cynthia Noble.

The project was expected to cost about $8 million to install and up to $500,000 a year to run, Mart Chief Operating Officer Myron Maurer told the Tribune earlier this year. He is senior executive in Chicago of Vornado Realty Trust, which owns the building and is footing the bill.